Ny publikation: Let There be Light! An Initial Exploratory Study of Whether Lighting Influences Consumer Evaluations of Packaged Food Products
2014-09-01Tobias Otterbring, Martin Löfgren and Magnus Lestelius
Journal of Sensory Studies, Volume 29, Issue 4, pages 294–300, August 2014
Abstract
This study investigates how lighting influences consumer evaluations of packaged food products. Fifty-eight participants evaluated two identical packaged meals (alternated between subjects) in a laboratory setting. The products were stored in a freezer with cold light (blue light-emitting diode [LED]) on one side and warm light (yellow LED) on the other side. A three-way mixed multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) revealed that, independent of package color and gender, food products were evaluated more negatively in the cold light than in the warm light in terms of quality, attractiveness and inferred taste. Therefore, lighting may influence consumers' overall evaluations of packaged meals. This finding also highlights the managerial problem whereby the lighting standards that exist at print agencies in order to eliminate ambiguities when making decisions about package design are rare for in-store lighting. Consequently, products that look attractive at the print agency may look unappealing in a store. The results are discussed in terms of processing fluency and cross-modal correspondences.